Balance of Power

Chapter Seven

"Gone? What do you mean he's gone?" Remo ran into the bathroom where Chiun stood on the toilet lid, peering out the open window.

"A true assassin," Chiun said, glowing. "Nothing can deter him from his goal."

"I've got to get to Raisin," Remo said.

The leader of URGE stood on the front steps of Longworth Hospital. He was wearing a short white hospital gown tied by two bows in the back, revealing a pair of red and green striped shorts. Before him, a dozen demonstrators similarly attired sprawled across the expanse of marble steps reading comic books and passing marijuana joints. Ahead of them, television cameras recorded the proceedings.

"My fellow freedom fighters," Raisin intoned into the microphones in front of him. A breeze shimmied through the thin gown he was wearing, causing it to ripple at his knees. "I stand before you today in the cause of justice." He turned aside and hissed, "Sheeit, brother, it cold out here. Go get me my robe."

A white man whose hospital gown was adorned with buttons advocating peace, the abolition of nuclear power, the execution of the Shah of Iran, the expulsion of whites from South Africa, the elimination of noise from urban centers, and a very old one demanding the death of anyone over thirty years of age, shuffled into the hospital to get Raisin the robe.

"I urge you to join us here at Longworth Hospital to help us meet our demands for equality in the medical profession. I urge you to participate in our call to action. I urge you to answer that call with us. Because, fellow supporters of this nation's oppressed Block Mon, the URGE must be met."

He pointed his finger in the air and scowled ferociously at the cameras. "And I tell you now as I stand before you, that I have more than a dream. I tell you, with four hundred years of black servitude echoing these words through the ages: I'VE GOT THE URGE!"

The people on the steps stirred. A young couple groped each other. Several of the pot smokers lay snoring. A tall black man wearing mirrored sunglasses shook a tambourine in time to disco music playing on his trunk-sized portable radio. "And you know, all of you who seek to break the chains of inequality, that when you've got the urge, you've got to do your duty!"

Remo walked up to Raisin. He wore a hospital gown untied over black chino pants and a tee shirt. He offered Raisin his robe. "Someone's going to try to kill you soon," Remo whispered, his back to the cameras.

"Who you?"

"Never mind. Get back inside the hospital."

"Fellow freedom fighters," Raisin shouted into the microphones. "I have just been informed that an attempt is being made on my life."

The groping couple squeezed closer together, their lips parted in ecstasy. The tambourine player rolled off to sleep.

"Would you shut up?" Remo said.

"And I say to you. I do not fear death from the hands of an assassin."

"Be quiet, will you? Just get inside."

"For what does a life signify without the full achievement of freedom for the Block Mon? I stand ready to die. And every Block Mon, woman and child stands ready to die in the cause of freedom." Raisin's chest puffed out. His chin jutted forward. One shoulder rose higher than the other and he planted one foot out in front of him as though he were a mold for a bronze statue. "Freedom now," he shouted.

The young couple began to copulate and rolled into the range of the cameras. "Cut!" somebody yelled from behind the TV equipment. "Get those two screwers out of here, will you?"

As the couple was being rolled out of sight, Remo once again requested that the director of URGE return to his hospital bed where he could be protected while Remo searched out his assassin.

"Thank you, boy, but nobody going to kill me 'fore the Lord do hisself. Besides, they all these TV cameras around. Ain't nobody going to do nothing serious on TV." He patted Remo on the shoulder. "You just go about your business. I'll get inside quick as I can. And thanks for the tip. It make a good speech. Freedom now!" he repeated into the cameras, which had been turned on again, the screwers having been removed.

Remo walked through the sparse crowd. No sign of Daniels. If Barney hadn't come directly to Calder Raisin, Remo reasoned, he must have gone back to see Gloria X for instructions. He would be back in Harlem.

Barney eased himself out of the taxi, his head pounding. Eight o'clock in the morning, and not one drink since before dawn.

Some protectors, Barney thought, remembering Remo and Chiun. They might be able to fight, but nobody who would refuse a drop of tequila to a thirsty man was any friend of his.

He pounded on the door to Gloria X's house. The Grand Vizier Malcolm opened it at once. Obeying orders, Malcolm stepped aside to allow Barney to race to the bar in the living room.

Perched on top of the bar was a silver hip flask of tequila with a note attached. It read: "I'm yours whenever you want me."

He unscrewed the cap and sniffed. The welcome aroma of fine tequila filled his nostrils and coursed down his throat, beckoning for more. "Oh, baby, do I want you," he said to the flask.

He let the glory gallop down his throat. Then he filled it up again after locating the tequila bottle.

"Dat's all, whitey," the Grand Vizier said, striding across the white room. "You coming with me now."

"Hold it, Baby Huey," Barney said. "I am to be admitted to the bar anytime I feel like it. Your massa told me."

The Grand Vizier lifted Barney over his head and carried him aloft out the door and into a black automobile, where two Peaches of Mecca snorted awake. Barney would have slugged it out with all of them were it not for the fact that he still held the cap to the hip flask in one hand and had to screw it back on so that the tequila in the flask would not be spilled.

As soon as he was tossed into the car, Barney was enveloped in a rough wool burnoose and handcuffed.

"I realize I ought to be getting used to this, but do you mind telling me where we're going?" he asked.

"We going to the Mosque," one of the Peaches said reverently. "You keep that hood over your face when we go in, else you get killed."

The Afro-Muslim Brotherhood mosque, about twenty minutes from Gloria X's, was identifiable by a hand painted sign on unvarnished plankboard nailed over another sign reading: Condemned Building. Do not enter.

"Open, doors of the faithful," the two Peaches cried in unison. The doors swung open heavily. Awfully heavily, Barney noted, for a condemned building that looked as though it would crumble to dust at a touch. And the doors were new. Fragments of steel shavings still clung to the hinges.

Barney was led through a maze of hallways, stairwells, past closed doors and giant empty rooms. The building had evidently been some kind of public building at one time, abandoned after Harlem ceased to be a quiet suburban retreat for middle-class white professionals and became the black Harlem it was today.

Barney could tell by the sound of his feet against the flooring that he was walking on a steel base. He bumped a wall with his elbow. Again steel. There were no windows.

The mosque was as well fortified as Gloria X's house.

Flanked by his two bodyguards, Barney ground to a halt in front of an enormous hall where a speaker, wrapped in purple swaths of silk, entreated his audience.

"Who keep you down?"

The answer was a soft grumble from five hundred black throats: "Whitey."

"Who kill our kids in these dirty slums?"

"Whitey."

"Who rob you, rape you, steal your bread?"

"Whitey."

"Who plan to wipe out the black man?"

"Whitey."

The speaker roared on, his voice rising above women in purple scarves on the left side of the old amphitheater, and above the dark, clean-shaven heads of the black-suited men on the right.

The speaker yelled. He pleaded. He cried put in the tradition of the black preacher. The temperature inside the old theater rose with the speaker's volume, manufacturing waves of perspiration. It flowed from black foreheads, black backs, black cheeks. It swamped brown armpits. It trickled down tan legs and tan spines. Yet no one moved. They sat rigid as soldiers, a theater full of zombies. Their only sign of life was the movement of their mouths as they murmured "Whitey."

"Whitey own this world," the speaker continued, "and he hate you. He hate your pure blackness which remind him of his own ugly white skin. He hate your strength and your courage and your wisdom. That why he want to kill you."

He paused a moment and smiled, a gold-toothed smile, a smile that cost him $4,275, from a white dentist in the Bronx, a smile he had bought while preaching for the Pentacostalist Gospelry Church. And that had paid well. But this paid unbelievably. That white woman with the blonde hair sure knew how to get his oratory moving.

"Whitey want to kill you, but we not gonna let him. You know why?" The hall was tomb-silent. "Because we gonna kill him, dat's why. We gonna end this blue-eyed tyranny over our lives.

"What we gonna do?" he asked. After a dramatic pause, he answered himself in a stage whisper. "We gonna kill, kill, kill." And then to the audience: "What we gonna do?"

Men stood to scream, released at last from the torture of their hot wooden seats. Women clapped their hands joyously. They all screamed, "Kill, kill, kill!"

"What ya gonna do?" the speaker asked again.

"Kill, kill, kill!"

"Say it again, children!"

"Kill, kill, kill!"

"Let Whitey hear you tell it."

"Kill, kill, kill!"

"Nice to see a community working together," Barney said to the two men at his sides. He reached for his hip flask, forgetting that his hands were cuffed together. As he was entangling himself in the folds of his burnoose, a figure veiled thickly in white tulle passed by, leaving a scent of lilacs in her wake. The Peaches of Mecca followed her, pressing Barney between them.

She led them through another maze, up a concrete stairway, down a long hall, through an empty room, and up another staircase. The stairs ended at yet another stairwell, this one a spiral of precision-made structural steel.

"You may wait here, gentlemen," the woman said, her voice dripping with plantation charm. The two Peaches nodded impassively. One of them handed her the key to Barney's handcuffs.

He followed her into an apartment of sparkling white, identical to her house in every detail except for a world map on a wall behind a white desk. There she removed her voluminous veil and white cloak. As Barney watched, she pulled off her opera-length white gloves. She untied a white rope belt around her waist. The dress she wore draped over one of her creamy shoulders and cascaded in Grecian folds to the floor, clinging to her curves all the way down. Smiling into Barney's hungry eyes, she pulled at the clasp over her shoulder with her manicured nails and let the dress fall to her feet.

She was naked beneath. Slowly, she stretched her arms over her head so that her breasts lifted beguilingly. Then she brought her hands down over the length of her body, caressing herself, her hips undulating, as Barney looked on, his hands chained together. It was a strangely familiar motion. Had he seen it before?

"I'm going to free your bonds now, Mr. Daniels," she purred.

"Allah be praised," Barney said. He was sweating hard in his woolen monk's robe.

She pressed one of her breasts into Barney's mouth as she unlocked the handcuffs. He did not take his lips from her as his hands searched out and found the treasure they were looking for. Then he moved his mouth away from her shiny wet nipple and wrapped it over the opening of the hip flask he had raised and was now emptying into his gullet. "Great stuff," he said appreciatively.

Gloria pulled him over to the bed and sated herself on him. As she came, screaming, Barney's hand fumbled over the surface of the nightstand for the bottle of tequila she had waiting for him. He took a swig, careful not to knock the bottle on Gloria's still thrashing head.

"That was great," she said dreamily.

"Best tequila I've ever had," Barney said.

"You don't care for me at all, do you?" Her voice grew suddenly cold.

Barney shrugged. "As much as I care for anything else," he said.

It was the truth. He would sit on Gloria's white Disneyland bed and fake love with her and let her dictate the part he would play in her little drama, because he had no other part to play. Barney's part had been left in Puerta del Rey a lifetime or two ago, and what he had now was his tequila, and nothing more.

He had gotten into this on a drunken whim and now he was a prisoner as sure as if he were in jail. It was a plush prison, to be sure, but a prison nonetheless, and Barney knew the sentence would be death, either from Gloria X and her trained seals or from the two men who had tried to help him.

He didn't want help. He didn't care if his death came soon or late. It was already long overdue. He had already been dead for a long, long time.

So why was he thinking about Puerta del Rey again? There was no answer to that most elementary question, the only question he ever asked: What happened? What happened? He forced his mind away from it. He made himself concentrate on the satin cushions around him on the bed, and on the tequila, and the tequila and the tequila.

And before the bottle was empty, the world was good and fine with Bernard C. Daniels.

Then he smelled the lilac perfume. "Wake up," Gloria said, shaking him. "It's night."

"Hell of a time to wake up."

"It's time."

"Time for what?"

"For killing Calder Raisin." She smiled, her lips stretched tight across her teeth. Blurred through Barney's drunken vision, her face appeared to him like a grinning death's head skull through a misty fog. "I had you moved here when I heard you'd made contact with your CIA friends."

"Don't have friends in the CIA," he said, his mouth still fuzzy.

"Those two on the corner. My men saw you. But now they don't know where you are, so they won't be able to help you, poor baby. You're going to have to kill poor Calder all by yourself." She patted his cheek. "Get up now. You have an appointment with Mr. Raisin at the Battery."

"What if I don't kill him?" Barney asked.

"Then you don't get the thousand dollars, darling," she said sweetly. "And you lose your life very painfully in the process. You know what 'painfully' means, don't you? Do you remember the pain, Mr. Daniels, or has the scar on your stomach healed completely?"

He leaped at her. "What do you know?" he demanded. "Tell me!" But her bodyguards were in the room, and pulled him away from the woman as she shrieked laughter as cold and shrill as the wail of a banshee.

There were no television cameras on the pier, as the two black reporters dressed in neat black suits had promised Calder Riaisin back at the hospital. Nor were there any microphones on the creaking boards of the deserted place where a group of demonstrators was supposed to be waiting for him.

As soon as the limousine filled with overly friendly reporters deposited Raisin at the pier and sped away into the darkness, he knew the black reporters were fakes and he had been brought to this isolated spot to be killed.

Calder Raisin shook his head. He had been warned.

A man was waiting for him, sitting on the planks, his back resting against a barnacle-encrusted dock support.

Only one man, thought Calder Raisin. But then it would only take one man to kill him. It was his own fault, Raisin reprimanded himself, for not listening to the young white man at the hospital rally. Well, there wasn't much he could do now. He would just try to get it over with as fast as he could.

"What you want?" Raisin asked, turning up the collar of his bathrobe to protect himself from the wind. He shifted his weight from one hospital slipper to another to fend off the chilly wind. His hands were stuffed deep inside the pockets of the robe from which, at the bottom, a half-inch of hospital gown protruded.

"I said, what you want," Raisin repeated. "Look, you gonna kill me or what?"

Barney looked up, first at Raisin, and then off over the glistening black water.

"See here. I didn't come all this way to stare at New York Harbor with you. Now, you gonna 'sassinate me, or I going to walk away?"

Barney looked out over the water. It reminded him of a giant inkwell. A place where all the words of his life could be obliterated in an instant. Words like honor. Decency. Love. Words he had lived by once, when he had had a reason for living. One jump, and he could be as dead and as meaningless as those words. The water would swallow him up, and the remains of Barney Daniels would disappear into it. The water. The cold, bleak, unforgiving, welcome water.

"Snap to, boy," Raisin said," bending over to slap Barney on the shoulder. "It's cold out here. You gonna freeze."

Barney stared out over the water.

Raisin's voice softened. "Hey, want to grab a cup of coffee somewheres?" the portly black man asked.

But Barney only stared.

Raisin picked up his red terrycloth slipper and bounced it on Barney's head. "Look alive, man," he shouted. "What is this stupidness? I get hauled out here in the middle of nowheres, getting the crap scared out of me 'cause I thinking you gonna kill me, and now you ain't about to do nothing. You on junk, boy?"

Barney didn't answer.

"You wasting my time. I got a sick-in demonstration going, so if you ain't going to rub me out, I better get back to it 'fore I die of the cold."

Barney offered Raisin his flask. "Have a drink," he said. "It'll warm you."

Raisin drank. "Man, what is that shit? Tastes like poison."

"Tequila," Barney said, regaining possession of the silver container. "But it could have been poisoned."

"Sure as hell tasted like it."

Ignoring the crass comment, Barney lifted the flask to his lips and let the liquid pour down his throat. "I could have poisoned you, you know," he said.

Raisin shrugged.

"Your wife wants me to kill you."

"Lorraine? What she want to do that for? Who gonna pay the bills on that split-level money-eater in Whiteyville?"

"Not Lorraine. Gloria. Your wife. The blonde."

"My wife ain't no blonde," Raisin protested. "Leastways she wasn't four days ago. Lorraine look mighty silly a blonde. I gonna slap her silly if she done dyed her hair. Blonde. Hmmph."

"Gloria," Barney said, louder.

"I don't know no Gloria, stupid white ignoramus. You done come down here to kill the wrong man. Good thing you spaced out."

"Her name is Gloria, I tell you," Barney shouted, "and she's paying me a thousand dollars to kill you."

Raisin hopped up and down, his jaw thrust forward. "Well, then, you do that, smartass. You just try and kill me." He put up his fists. "Weirdo white junkie."

"Oh, get lost," Barney said.

"I ain't leaving till you 'pologize for calling my wife a white woman."

"I won't apologize. Go."

"I ain't going."

"Then you'll have to die here on the pier, because the drink I gave you was poisoned." Barney stood up to leave.

"Woah," Raisin said, restraining Barney with a shaky black arm. "You lying. Speaking falsehoods. You lying, ain't you?"

Barney ambled toward the end of the pier and sat down, his legs dangling off the edge. The water. The black, forgetful water.

"Wait, man," Raisin said, running to him and grabbing his arm.

"That's my drinking arm," Barney said. He yanked it free and took a long swallow from his flask.

"You ain't put nothing in that drink you give me, did you? I mean, you drank it yourself. Ain't nothing in it, right? Did she pay you in advance, or is she waiting for you to finish me off?"

Daniels pondered a moment, peered into the desperate eyes of a fellow human being, contemplated the obligation of all mankind to be responsible for all mankind, the true meaning of brotherhood, mercy and love and finally decided that if he were to relieve Raisin's doubts it might be whole seconds before he could get back to his flask of tequila.

"Yes," Barney said with finality. "It was poisoned."

"Oh, Lordie Lord!" Raisin's hands clutched around his throat.

"And I'm going to sit right here and die with you," Barney said, thumping on the rotted wood of the pier. ''The perfect murder-suicide."

Calder Raisin ran off into the night, up the length of the pier and deep into the shadows behind. But it was only a matter of seconds after Raisin scurried away until Barney heard a thud, and then the whooshing of air a man makes when his lungs are collapsing, and then a small moan. And another thud.

Then they were on him, around him, behind him, hundreds of them, it seemed.

Then Barney felt the sharp, searing pain, acid pain, oh, beautiful, numbing, terrible, shaking pain.

Frantic footsteps tore away into the blackness. Barney felt beneath his shoulder blades for the wounds. Just a little oozing dampness from all three cuts. He had not lost much blood, but oh God, the pain. Barney leaned against a dock support, fought to bring air into his lungs, then staggered up the ramp like a drunk.

And then he thought he saw her again. Once again, as though she had never gone.

"Denise," he whispered. Her face was in front of him again and she was smiling and the smell of her was on him, warm and giving and forever, before she began to fade again, into the black sea and the fetid air of the harbor.

"Denise," he called into the cold wind. But she was gone. Again.

He fell. And then there was blackness, the blackness for which he was grateful after an endless lifetime of waiting.